Research in Physics

I am interested in general relativistic astrophysics with a focus on gravitational waves. Most of my work is concerned with the dynamics of compact binaries (composed of black holes/neutron stars) and the gravitational waves they emit. During my PhD, I studied spin effects in such binaries. Later I investigated dynamical tides, which become important when the orbital motion is in resonance with an oscillation mode of the compact star. This is of particular interest for neutron stars and I was granted a DFG research fellowship for this project.

Currently, I am working at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in the group for Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, in particular on the effective-one-body model for gravitational waveforms from compact binaries. In this effective-one-body model, the results of analytic approximations are incorporated synergetically, together with information from full-fledged numerical simulations. This makes it one of the most powerful tools to predict gravitational waveforms for gravitational wave astronomy. Recently, I also got interested in methods for calculating scattering amplitudes and connections to gravitational waves.